Month: February 2010

Russell Shorto reports on a campaign to pressure "the most influential state board of education in the country" to recast its history books in a Christianist light. Brian Spears worries:

The problem…is that Texas has an outsized effect on the school textbook industry (for now, at least–e-books might lessen that grip in the future). What Texas wants, Texas tends to get, and that spills over into other states because textbook publishers don’t want to make multiple editions of the same book. So if Texas wants Magruder’s American Government to call the US Constitution an “enduring” document instead of a “living” document (even though the book has called it “living” since World War I, hardly a period of radical liberalism in US history), Texas gets the change.

"So I have spent my life watching, not to see beyond the world, merely to see, great mystery, what is plainly before my eyes. I think the concept of transcendence is based on a misreading of creation. With all respect to heaven, the scene of miracle is here, among us. The eternal as an idea is much less preposterous than time, and this very fact should seize our attention. In certain contexts the improbable is called the miraculous.

What is eternal must always be complete, if my understanding is correct. So it is possible to imagine that time was created in order that there might be narrative — event, sequence and causation, ignorance and error, retribution, atonement.

A word, a phrase, a story falls on rich or stony ground and flourishes as it can, possibility in a sleeve of limitation. Certainly time is the occasion for our strangely mixed nature, in every moment differently compounded, so that often we surprise ourselves, and always scarcely know ourselves, and exist in relation to experience, if we attend to it and if its plainness does not disguise it from us, as if we were visited by revelation." — Marilynne Robinson, "Psalm 8", from "The Death of Adam"

Robinson is one of the great thinkers of our time. That's probably why so many have never heard of her.

(Photo: Dibyangshu Sarkar/AFP/Getty.)

Brilliant.

Peter Lennox learns everything from his chickens:

Watching chickens is a very old human pastime, and the forerunner of psychology, sociology and management theory. Sometimes understanding yourself can be made easier by projection on to others. Watching chickens helps us understand human motivations and interactions, which is doubtless why so many words and phrases in common parlance are redolent of the hen yard: "pecking order", "cockiness", "ruffling somebody's feathers", "taking somebody under your wing", "fussing like a mother hen", "strutting", a "bantamweight fighter", "clipping someone's wings", "beady eyes", "chicks", "to crow", "to flock", "get in a flap", "coming home to roost", "don't count your chickens before they're hatched", "nest eggs" and "preening".

Maplewood, New Jersey, 10.46 am

Esquire's profile of Roger Ebert is blazing through the blogosphere:

The last thing he said? Ebert thinks about it for a few moments, and then his eyes go wide behind his glasses, and he looks out into space in case the answer is floating in the air somewhere. It isn't. He looks surprised that he can't remember. He knows the last words Studs Terkel's wife, Ida, muttered when she was wheeled into the operating room ("Louis, what have you gotten me into now?"), but Ebert doesn't know what his own last words were. He thinks he probably said goodbye to Chaz before one of his own trips into the operating room, perhaps when he had parts of his salivary glands taken out — but that can't be right. He was back on TV after that operation. Whenever it was, the moment wasn't cinematic. His last words weren't recorded. There was just his voice, and then there wasn't.

Ebert adds a few more thoughts at his blog.

Ryan Sager considers how sex and love drive the economy:

[T]he urge to find a mate drives us — particularly men, it seems — to increase our productivity and make bigger investments in human capital (e.g. education) than we otherwise would.  It’s also suggestive that so much creative genius — in fields as diverse as physics and jazz — seems to peak before or around 30. And, that marriage seems to have a negative impact on productivity in such fields.

[Re-posted from last night]

Alex Knepper, an openly gay conservative, bumped into the young student of “natural law” at CPAC, who gave the entirely meretricious attack on the inclusion of “GOPride” [sic] at CPAC above. It’s a revealing exchange. Sorba is quite fixated on the issue of homosexuality, for some reason. But here’s the full exchange:

My recollections are not perfect, of course, but Nate Gunderson should be able to help me fill in the details. The exchange is roughly as follows.

“So, you’re the infamous Ryan Sorba,” I said. “Yep!” “You’ve made quite a name for yourself.” “Haha, yeah. Where are you from?” “I go to college around here, American University.” “What are you studying?”

“I was double-majoring in Political Science with a political theory focus and International Relations with an Islamic Studies focus, but I think I’m going to drop the latter. I can’t take the relativistic preaching, the whitewashing of the burqa, Sayyid Qutb, the entire religion.”

“Yeah, I know what you mean. So what did you think of my little tirade, then?” “Oh, I thought it was quite evil, actually. I’m gay.” “You mean you think you’re gay.” “No, I’m gay. Do you think it’s a choice?” “I think it’s the result of a complex process of social and environmental factors, but that it’s reversible.” “So, like, why is it that over one hundred animals have been observed engaging in homosexual sex in nature?” “Well, only 0.2% of animals are known to do that — ” ” — I mean, mammals, obviously, not ants, birds — ” ” — you know, animals masturbate, your dog humps your leg. Does your dog talk with a lisp?” “Do I talk with a lisp?!” I yelled.

“A little bit.” (I later asked a couple of gay friends if I have a small lisp; both of them said I have no lisp whatsoever. Aron, who is straight, has said my voice is sometimes theatrical, but that I don’t have a lisp.)

“Rudy Giuliani has a lisp — is he gay?”

And then he went off on what he affectionately called “his tirade” — giving the same mangled pseudo-Aristotelian spiel about how natural rights have to be grounded in natural law, meaning substance, and the final result of the reproductive organ must be a reproductive act, and all of that.

“Yeah, yeah, I get your argument, I understand it, ” I tried to interrupt, But he said that I didn’t, and he finished.

“But the vast majority of married couples partake in sodomy — oral sex, anal sex, fetishes. Hasn’t your girlfriend ever given you a blowjob? I think the government should just get out of the whole marriage business!”

Everyone around us agreed with that statement. Sensing some momentum, I went on: “I’m the one who says that my values shouldn’t have anything to do with government. It’s you who wants to impose his own biases upon the rest of the world!”

Nate Gunderson pondered why it was such a burning issue for Ryan.

“Because conservatives should not be upholding groups who support homosexual marriage and sodomy.”

I said something I don’t quite recall, and he mentioned something about how he could “take me on” physically if he needed to, to which I mentioned that his quick resort to force and threats said a lot about his political philosophy.

He said at around this point that he needed to go, and put out his hand to say goodbye. I stared at him, refusing to shake his hand, and he said “Well, I don’t really want to shake your hand, you’re intrinsically evil.”

We all started walking away, with him talking to his girlfriend, and me talking to Nate, blasting Sorba more.

Someone who was with him asked Sorba: “Really, though, he had a point: why do you care about this so much when the economy is in shambles and the debt is growing and spending is out of control?”

“Because it corrupts the youth and the culture,” he replied.

When we reached the area near the escalator downstairs, he turned on his camera. I put out my arms, striking a mocking pose, but realized he kept holding the camera at me.

“Wait, are you recording or taking a picture?” He was recording.

“Ah! OK…Well, I’d like to say, then, that the person behind the camera is a Hitler Youth waiting for a fuhrer to sweep him off his feet into a grand national project so he can sacrifice individuals like stock-fodder to his own biases.”

He turned off the camera and approached me. I told him he should get his girlfriend to give him a blowjob so that he could experience the joys of sodomy. He put two of his fingers an inch from my face and said that he’d want to fight me if a girl wasn’t around. “Ah, the use of force!” I said again.

It essentially ended, there.